The accidental diplomat
Page 3 of 3 -- While some French executives embraced TDS's vision of French hotels spiffed out with American-style amenities (and stuffed exclusively with American tourists), many others leapt to the defense of traditional French hotelry. After all, they pointed out, it was Old World charm, not up-to-the-minute plumbing, that drew tourists in the first place. France, one traditionalist thundered, must resist the "monster hotels of the new world." And those glasses of ice water? The very notion is "sad, quite simply," sniffed an editorialist in the French trade magazine L'Htellerie.
. . . By the time the TDS disbanded in 1951, French hotels had largely resisted a move to American standards -- to the evident satisfaction of American tourists, who, according to a 1950 poll cited by Endy, considered French hotels excellent or good. But many of its larger goals were taken up a decade later by a very different hospitality crusader -- Charles de Gaulle. By the end of the 1950s, the postwar travel boom was in full swing, with nearly 800,000 Americans making visits to France at decade's end -- a 200 percent increase from 1950. Within a month after the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1959, de Gaulle appointed a new minister of tourism, who promptly turned toward winning tax breaks for hotel construction and expanding overseas tourism marketing. But de Gaulle's biggest offensive came in a more intangible area. As much as he enjoyed twitting American foreign policy, when it came to American visitors (who would account for 40 percent of all tourist dollars in the 1960s) de Gaulle wanted France to be all smiles. Though surveys showed that most American visitors found French service courteous and helpful, Gaullist officials decided Old World manners were wanting. Shortly after taking office in 1960, Jean Sainteny, de Gaulle's hospitality chief, called for the recovery of the "legendary smile of the French" -- a plea that earned him the sobriquet "high commissioner for smiling." The 1965 tourist season saw a "National Campaign for Reception and Friendliness," whose centerpiece was cheques-sourire, or smile checks, which tourists mailed to the French tourism office when they received friendly service from a waiter or hotel employee. (The 10 most honored French workers were awarded a trip to Tahiti.) American Francophiles were horrified by this assault on traditional French hauteur. "The day may come when prettily housed, flawlessly served tourists will nostalgically prowl this country in search of an old-fashioned curmudgeonly French concierge or a surly Paris waiter to sneer at them on their way," one commentator groused. (Though Endy is skeptical of the friendliness campaign, he acknowledges that France's byzantine tipping and billing practices remained an abiding source of transatlantic friction. As one Californian complained to The New York Times in 1964, "It bites me when these French look at me like I'd beaten a child with a stick when I don't distribute money all over the restaurant when I leave.") . . . Endy argues that the sense of a friendliness "crisis" in France came both from within and without. Even as Americans endured their own debates over the emergent Ugly American stereotype, American politicians, frustrated by Gaullist foreign policy, loudly called for boycotts on travel to France in language that could almost be ripped from last spring's headlines. In 1965, J. William Fulbright urged American tourists to "spare themselves the sophisticated debauchery and artistic pick pocketing of Paris." But French politicians also chimed in with reservations about French hospitality. In 1964, Gaullist minister of finance and future French president Valy Giscard d'Estaing, frustrated by the hotel sector's resistance to Gaullist technocratic ideals, denounced it as "the most disagreeable, quarrelsome" industry in France. Meanwhile, Senator Edouard Bonnefous bemoaned his country's lack of manners -- a comment quickly picked up by a Newsweek article denouncing France for its "poor service and incomparable insolence from servants." One Parisian barman, at least, was only too happy to confirm Bonnefous's observation: "We're naturally inhospitable to foreigners," he told the Newsweek reporter. Even Paris Match picked up the theme. Had the French become the "grouches of Europe," the magazine wondered? Ultimately, Endy writes, these debates "masked the reality of largely satisfied Americans coming to France in ever increasing numbers." What played out in the 1960s was an internal struggle between modernizers and traditionalists over what made France distinctly French -- a dispute that still rages today in the age of le Big Mac and the euro. "The French were trying to have it both ways: to keep their local communities and adapt to the pressures of the international marketplace," Endy says. It's a balance, he adds, that France has maintained today. Well, almost: After all, while France as a whole may be the world's number-one tourist destination, its single most popular attraction isn't the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre -- but Euro Disney.
Matthew Price is a regular contributor to the Globe. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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